Hutchins Lecture with Andrew Kahrl

Hutchins Lecture with Andrew Kahrl, assistant professor of history, Marquette University, “The Sunbelt’s Sandy Foundation: Coastal Development and the Making of the Modern South.” Introduced by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, UNC.

A scholar interested in the social, legal, and environmental history of beaches, coastal property, and waterfront real estate development in the United States, Dr. Kahrl examines how coastal areas both reflect and constitute relations of power, of tensions between human and environmental exploitation. His talk will trace the rise of southern beach resorts and coastal real estate from the perspective of the African American communities who once lived, worked, and played along these shores, and who have increasingly succumbed to the combined forces of man and nature.  These ideas are more fully explored in his book The Land was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, published this spring by Harvard University Press. Among other accomplishments, he was a 2008–09 fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.